Random musings on history, politics, and more

Archive for July 3rd, 2009

For reasons I won’t go into here, I suddenly find myself with most of a six-month lease on a VPS/VDS that I don’t actually have an immediate need for, doh. I’m not paying a huge amount for it (around 7 or 8 USD/mo, I think), so this lack of utilization isn’t a huge issue, but it gets me to wondering… what should I do with it?

I already run a TOR node elsewhere, and don’t really want to run a second. I thought about maybe running a TOR hidden service or two, but nobody uses the ones that are already out there, except for child porn, and, um, no. I don’t want to offer free webhosting to cheapskate assholes or “sponsor” a “clan” of spastic teenage malcontents, or whatever. No, I will not run your bittorrent tracker; no, I will not let you seed torrents off this machine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don’t even ask.

The server is running Debian (but that can be changed); it has 512MB RAM, about 20GB of disk space, fairly beefy CPU access, and 300GB of bandwidth per month. It’s in the central United States somewhere, and the host forbids anything IRC-related, as well as spam, w4r3z, h4x0r stuph, et cetera.

If you had this available, what would you do? Assuming there were scores being handed out – which there aren’t – you’d get bonus points for ideas that are “socially responsible”, community-oriented (for a given value of “community”, anyway), or just plain nifty. Realistic ideas that involve software or applications which actually exist, please; no “Find someone to write a Ruby application which…” kinds of suggestions, right?